In World Gone Missing, Laurie Ann Doyle’s powerful debut collection, people have disappeared. In these stories set in and around San Francisco, contemporary issues—divorce, sexual identity, homelessness—thread through a cast of memorable characters struggling to fill the void of a missing loved one. From the newly married couple anxiously searching for a brother who didn’t come home one night, to the successful businesswoman increasingly obsessed with a high school friend she hasn’t seen in decades, to the middle-aged clerk meeting her son’s birth-mother for the first time, Doyle’s writing vividly evokes the loss and liberation absence can bring.

Stories in this book have won the Alligator Juniper National Fiction Award, and been nominated for Best New American Voices and the Pushcart Prize.

Laurie Ann Doyle is the co-founder of the long-running literary series Babylon Salon in San Francisco. Her stories and essays have been published in The Los Angeles Review, Timber, Jabberwork Review, Under the Sun, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at The San Francisco Writers Grotto and UC Berkeley.She lives in Berkeley.

Candace Eros Diaz co-curates the reading series Babylon Salon and is the Coordinator of Admissions and Student Services for the MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College. Her work has appeared in Under the Gum Tree, The East Bay Review, Arroyo Literary Review and Huizache.